Academic staff

Modules taught

Undergraduate

• World Literature
• Crticial Theory in Action
• American Vistas: Literature and Culture of the USA
• The Culture of Modernity
• The Shock of the New
• African-American Avant-Gardes
• Creative Writing: Experiments in Writing

Postgraduate

• Critical Debates and Methods in Postgraduate English
• Twentieth Century Texts: American Literature and its Transatlantic Contexts
• Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
• Independent Study in English Studies

 

Supervision

• MA dissertations on American and Twentieth/Twenty-first Century Literature Topics
• PhD Supervisor: Avant-Garde Writing, Technology and the Everyday; Transatlantic Receptions of Edgar Allen Poe (completed); Hybridity and the 'American Strain' in Twentieth Century American Poetry (now completed)
• PhD Supervision team: Marilyn Robinson and Communities of Mourning

Eric's first monograph, Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism, was published by Edinburgh University Press's Edinburgh Studies in Transaltantic Literature series in 2013. The book investigates how modernist writers interrogated the relationship between physical places, the printed page, and cultural identity in ‘little magazines’, the artist-run journals that fostered literary modernism in the early twentieth century. He has also edited critical facsimile editions of William Carlos Williams’s early prose, and with Craig Saper, the influential vanguardist anthology Readies for Bob Brown's Machine. Eric's new book Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic: Avant-Gardes, Technology and the Everyday (EUP 2020) argues that modernist avant-gardes used technology not only as a means of analysing culture, but as a way of feeding back into it with their inventions and collaborations as well as their creative work. The AGAST Project - an Impact Case Study for REF 2020 emerging from this research - seeks to harness the forgotten promise of modernism: that art and technology can combine to produce significant social change.

Research group membership

Eric is the leader of the Medicine, Science and Technology cluster in EML and founder of the Avant-Gardes and Speculative Technology (AGAST) Project, an interdisciplinary consortium that re-creates the inventions of twentieth-century writers and artists using Augmented and Virtual Reality. 

Research impact

The Avant-Gardes and Speculative Technology (AGAST) Project recovers the forgotten promise of modernism: that art and technology can combine to produce significant social change. Since launching in 2014, AGAST has dismantled barriers to social, technological, and cultural inclusion in the UK and internationally by: A) improving outreach, digital heritage, and STEAM policy and provision in libraries and museums; B) building capacity and enhancing outreach for marginalised young people in third-sector organisations; and C) generating new public works of art from research. Together these activities have empowered disenfranchised groups, especially young people, to combine creative and technical activity for positive social change.

Further information

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-transatlantic-avant-gardes.html

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-reading-machines-in-the-modernist-transatlantic.html

https://www.brookes.ac.uk/poetry-centre/projects/avant-gardes-and-speculative-technology/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0DOp107-G8&t=

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2By1pCx7vU&amp=&feature=youtu.be

 

Books

• White E, Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic: Avant-Gardes, Technology and the Everyday, Edinburgh University Press (2020)
  ISBN: 9781474441490 eISBN: 9781474441520
  Abstract

  Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic provides a new account of aesthetic and technological innovation, from the Machine Age to the Information Age. Drawing on a wealth of archival discoveries, it argues that modernist vanguardists used technology not only as a means of analysing and critiquing culture, but as a way of feeding back into it. As well as uncovering a new invention by the poet Mina Loy, and revealing the untold story of Bob and Rose Brown’s infamous reading machines, the book places avant-gardes at the centre of innovation across a variety of fields. From Dazzle Camouflage to Reading Machines, and from rail networks to broadcast technology, White explores how avant-gardes combined technicity and aesthetics to provoke socio-political change and to explore new modes of being modern.
  

  Website 
• White E, The early career of William Carlos Williams: a critical facsimile edition of uncollected prose and manuscripts, Texas Tech University Press (2013)
  Website 
• White E, Transatlantic avant-gardes: little magazines and localist modernism, Edinburgh University Press (2013)
  ISBN: 9780748645213
  Abstract ransatlantic Avant-Gardesoffers a revisionary account of the evolution of twentieth-century modernism. Complimenting recent studies of modernist expatriates, Eric White explores new points of contact between European and American avant-gardes to place ‘located' figures such as William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Jean Toomer, and Alfred Kreymborg back into the 'global design' of literary modernism. Focusing on artist-run 'little magazines' (includingOthers, Contact, The Little Review, Blast, The Dial, Fire!!,andPagany) and selected fine press publications and mainstream periodicals, White also reconsiders the boundaries that traditionally divide modernist literature into 'exile' and 'localist', or 'regionalist' and 'cosmopolitan', factions. Thus, the book proposes a version of localist modernism that prioritises issues of geographic and textual 'location' to deliver a 'networked' approach to American modernism in the transatlantic context. Combining literary-historical, textual, and cultural criticism,Transatlantic Avant-Gardesprovides a new reading of the specialised literary networks that interrogated the relationship between geographic place, textual space and national identity in the modernist transatlantic.
  

Journal articles

• Wild, F, Marshall, L, Bernard, J, White, E, Twycross, J, 'UNBODY: A Poetry Escape Room in Augmented Reality'
  Information 12 (8) (2021)
  ISSN: 2078-2489 eISSN: 2078-2489
  Abstract

  The integration of augmented reality (AR) technology into personal computing is happening fast, and augmented workplaces for professionals in areas such as Industry 4.0 or digital health can reasonably be expected to form liminal zones that push the boundary of what currently possible. The application potential in the creative industries, however, is vast and can target broad audiences, so with UNBODY, we set out to push boundaries of a different kind and depart from the graphic-centric worlds of AR to explore textual and aural dimensions of an extended reality, in which words haunt and re-create our physical selves. UNBODY is an AR installation for smart glasses that embeds poetry in the user’s surroundings. The augmented experience turns reality into a medium where holographic texts and film clips spill from dayglow billboards and totems. In this paper, we develop a blueprint for an AR escape room dedicated to the spoken and written word, with its open source code facilitating uptake by others into existing or new AR escape rooms. We outline the user-centered process of designing, building, and evaluating UNBODY. More specifically, we deployed a system usability scale (SUS) and a spatial interaction evaluation (SPINE) in order to validate its wider applicability. In this paper, we also describe the composition and concept of the experience, identifying several components (trigger posters, posters with video overlay, word dropper totem, floating object gallery, and a user trail visualization) as part of our first version before evaluation. UNBODY provides a sense of situational awareness and immersivity from inside an escape room. The recorded average mean for the SUS was 59.7, slightly under the recommended 68 average but still above ‘OK’ in the zone of low marginal acceptable. The findings for the SPINE were moderately positive, with the highest scores for output modalities and navigation support. This indicated that the proposed components and escape room concept work. Based on these results, we improved the experience, adding, among others, an interactive word composer component. We conclude that a poetry escape room is possible, outline our co-creation process, and deliver an open source technical framework as a blueprint for adding enhanced support for the spoken and written word to existing or coming AR escape room experiences. In an outlook, we discuss additional insight on timing, alignment, and the right level of personalization.
  

  Website 
• White E, 'Technicities of Deception: Dazzle Camouflage, Avant-Gardes, and Sensory Augmentation in the First World War'
  Modernist Cultures 12 (1) (2017) pp.36-58
  ISSN: 2041-1022 eISSN: 1753-8629
  Abstract This essay identifies a new form of technicity that emerged in the First World War, in which enhancement and distortion effects generated by sensory augmentation technologies could be manipulated for strategic purposes, by a variety of cultural agents. It argues that dazzle camouflage, a technology developed by the British Admiralty in 1917 to delay and confuse attacking U-boats, exemplifies this mediation of everyday life both on and off the battle fronts. Focusing on the London Vorticists, but also drawing on Futurist precedents, the essay explores how avant-gardes articulated the impact that technicities of augmentation had on modern selfhood.Website 
• White E, ''A machine of mirrors': technology and identity in the modernist transatlantic'
  Symbiosis 17 (2) (2013) pp.69-87
  ISSN: 0334-5114 eISSN: 1878-7665
  
• White E, 'Continent of conjecture: imitation, ephemera, and American canons in Robert McAlmon's contact editions'
  European Journal of American Culture 32 (3) (2013) pp.--
  ISSN: 1466-0407
  
• White E, 'Advertising localist modernism: William Carlos Williams, 'Aladdin Einstein' and the transatlantic avant-garde in Contact'
  European Journal of American Culture 28 (2) (2009) pp.141-165
  ISSN: 1466-0407
  Abstract Critics of early twentieth-century American modernism traditionally divide its key literary figures into two camps: the cosmopolitan"exiles" who expatriated themselves from the United States, and those who stayed at home. However, recent studies have challenged such dichotomies in the modernist canon, and drawing on the emerging field of transatlantic literary studies, this article investigates Contact, a specialized"little magazine" edited by William Carlos Williams and Robert McAlmon which has been frequently characterized as an exclusively national(ist) project. My argument is that Contact actually represents a sophisticated expression of localist modernism, a specific element of the transatlantic avant-garde that emerged (rather than diverged) from an international network of artist-run journals in the early twentieth century. Using a combination of literary-historical analysis, textual studies practices and extensive archival research, this article focuses on the"Advertising Number" , a special issue of Contact that has until now been overlooked by critics. Albert Einstein's arrival in America initiated a heady collision of avant-garde poetics, mainstream print culture and global economics in the pages of New York's little magazines. In the Advertising Number, Williams enlisted his literary milieu, including a surprising contribution from the"exile" Ezra Pound, to explore a pivotal cultural moment in the evolution of the transatlantic avant-garde.Website 

Book chapters

• White E, 'Transnational Circuits and Homemade Machines: U.S. Modernism in Europe' in Whalan M (ed.), Cambridge History of American Modernism, Cambridge University Press (2022)
  Abstract

  This chapter is about U.S. Modernism in Europe, and the individuals that criss-crossed the Atlantic from the United States to Europe from the dawn of the twentieth century to the Second World War. Rather than charting a one-way flow of Americans to Continental Europe, however, it explores how U.S. vanguardists engaged with a range of European contexts and represented them to a transatlantic audience, both on the Continent, and back home. And rather than reaffirming or supplanting any particular canons, it emphasises the co-construction and mutual dependence of particular modernist formations. To do so, it identifies a few crucial nodes of cultural activity that operated at the centre and on the margins of modernist discourse networks: the Black Atlantic of the Harlem Renaissance; transatlantic "little magazines"; and expatriate writers who were also publishers, editors and salonnières. But it also consider the technologies, expressions of popular culture, and indeterminacies of race, ethnicity, gender and class that emerged as particularly "American" tropes of industrial modernity in these exchanges. Transatlantic networks challenge us to ask precisely what we mean by "U.S. Modernism in Europe" – and engaging with any of them produces complicated, sometimes counter-intuitive, responses. For those discussed in this chapter, it meant embracing, slightly anxiously, the indeterminacies of the Machine Age and constructing a new mode of "being American" in Europe.

• White E, 'Canto 32' in Richard Parker (ed.), Readings in the Cantos: Volume 1, (2018)
  ISBN: 9781942954408 eISBN: 9781942954415
  Website 
• White E, 'William Carlos Williams and the Local' in MacGowan C (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to William Carlos Williams, Cambridge University Press (2016)
  ISBN: 9781107479081 eISBN: 9781316154991
  Website 
• White E, 'In the American grain: Contact (1920-3; 1932) and Pagany: a native quarterly (1930-3)' in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Volume II, North America 1894-1960, Oxford University Press (2012)
  ISBN: 9780199545810
  

Conferences

 Conferences Organised

• Surrealist Topographies Symposium, Maison Française, Oxford, April 2016 (with Nathalie Aubert)
• 'Avant-Gardes Now!' Symposium, May 2015, Oxford Brookes University (with Niall Munro)
• ‘Modernist Magazines in the Americas: Points of Departure’, December 2012, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford (with Alex Goody and Niall Munro)

Selected Conference Papers, Plenaries, and Panel Chairing

• Invited paper: ‘Reading (and Building) Machines: Modernist Women Poets and Emancipatory Technicities’, Department of English, University of Oxford, Oct 2020.
• 'Reading Machines' [TED talk on Bob Brown's Reading Machine and the AGAST Project], TEDx Whitehall, Royal Society, London, Jan 2018 
• 'A Machine of Words, a Machine of Mirrors: William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound and Networked New York', MLA Conference, New York, NY, USA, Jan 2018 
• ‘On the Move and On the Margins: Stranded Expatriates in Globe and The New Review’, North American Periodical Studies/Centre for Travel Writing Studies Symposium, Nottingham Trent University, September 2017
• ‘The Avant-Gardes and Speculative Technology Reading Machine’, Digital Exhibition, Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference, Beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam, August 2017
• ‘The Future's Future is in the Past: Augmented Reality, Digital Humanities, and the Modernist Archive’, invited presentation, Centre for the Digital Humanities, Princeton University, April 2017
• ‘Bob Brown’s Reading Machine: Augmented Technicities and Augmented Selves’, MSA 2017 Conference, Pasedena, CA, USA, November 2016
• Invited paper, ‘Augmented Avant-Gardes’, English Research Seminar, University of Sheffield, May 2016
• ‘Railroad Avenue: Rail Technologies and Periodical Print Culture in African American Modernist Writing', NAPS Periodical and American Studies Symposium, British Library, December 2015
• ‘Pragmatism, Cultural Localism, and Modernism’, ‘Local Modernisms: 1890-1950’, University of Birmingham, June 2015.
• 'Avant-Garde Periodicals and WWI', London Modernism Seminar, Senate House, London, May 2015.
• 'Unfinished Business: Speculation and Modernist Legacies in Avant-Garde Journals',  The Contemporary Small Press: A Symposium, University of Westminster, February 2015.
• '"A Dark, Distorted, Tricky, Mirror": The Aging Machine in Late Modernist Manhattan', 'Late Modernist Manhattan' panel, MLA 2015, Vancouver, CA, January 2015.
• '"What is Under My Nose': William Carlos Williams, Locality and the Modernist Transatlantic', Department of English and Modern Languages Research Seminar Series, Oxford Brookes University, November 2014.
• 'Dazzle Camouflage: Avant-Gardes and Invisibility in WW1', Transatlantic Seminar Series, Department of English, University of Oxford, October 2014.
• 'Modernist Avant-Gardes and Speculative Technologies' presentation, AHRC Science and Culture Ignite! Event, Natural History Museum, London, Wednesday 26th March 2014.
• ‘American Histories: Bricolage, Pastiche, and Robert McAlmon’s Contact Editions’, MSA 15 Conference: ‘Everydayness and the Event’, University of Sussex, Brighton, September 2013.
• ‘“Unnatural Mirrors”: the Revolution of the Word in Paris, New York, and London’, Symbiosis Conference, Brunel University, Uxbridge, June 2013.
• Plenary Lecture: ‘Localism and “the Local” in the Modernist Transatlantic’, ‘Mapping the Self’ Symposium, Dec. 2012, Oxford Brookes University. 
• ‘The Transatlantic Avant-Garde, and the Voyage to Pagany’, Modern Languages Association Conference, Seattle, WA, USA, January 2012.
• ‘The Missing Baedeker: The Travel Writing of Pound and Williams’, 24th Ezra Pound International Conference, Senate House, University of London, July 2011.
• ‘American Localist Modernism and the Transatlantic Avant-Garde’, American Literature Graduate Seminar, Rothermere American Insitute, University of Oxford, February 2011.
• ‘“My God † What Eyes”: Bob Brown, Marcel Duchamp, and the Optical Mechanics of Modernism’, European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies Conference 2010, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland, 9-11 September 2010
• Co-organiser (with Laura Marcus), ‘Automatic Writing / Automated Reading: Technology and Modernist Legacies’ panel, at the ‘Material Cultures: Technology, Textuality, and Transmission’ Conference, University of Edinburgh, 16-18 July, 2010.
• ‘“Marcel’s Color Machine”: the Technological Improvisations of Marcel Duchamp and William Carlos Williams’, ‘Material Cultures: Technology, Textuality, and Transmission’ Conference, University of Edinburgh, 16-18 July, 2010.
• ‘The Machine Age in Transatlantic Modernism’, ‘Modernism, Cultural Exchange and Transnationality’: The Second Conference of the Modernist Magazines Project, University of Sussex, Brighton, July 2009.
• ‘“See, They Return”: American Modernists in Contact Editions and the transatlantic review’, Scottish Network for Modernist Studies Seminar, the University of Edinburgh, May 2009.
• ‘Technology and American Identity in the Transatlantic Avant-Garde’, STAR (Scotland’s Transatlantic Relations) Research Seminar, IASH, the University of Edinburgh, March 2009.
• ‘Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams in the Transatlantic Context’, Literature Speaker Series, School of English Literature, University of Newcastle, February 2009.
• ‘“A Core About Which/Not a Box Inside Which”: American Modernism Under Construction’, American Studies Seminar, University of Sussex, Brighton, December 2008.
• ‘Modernist Magazines, Transatlantic Print Culture, and the Rise of the Avant-Garde’, plenary lecture, OU Book History Series, Senate House, London, December 2008.
• ‘“Descend into Place”: Cultural Localism and Dislocation in The Exile and Pagany’, presented at the ‘Modernist Magazines and Politics’ Conference, Université du Maine, Le Mans, FR, June 2008.
• ‘The Crowd Master?: Blast and the Question of Audience’, presented at the ‘Wyndham Lewis: Modernity and Critique’ Conference, Birmingham and Midland Institute, January 2008.
• ‘Building an American Avant-Garde: the Early Prose of William Carlos Williams’, Gallup Plenary Lecture, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA, January 2008.
• Chair, ‘William Carlos Williams and Little Magazines’ Panel, held at the Annual Modern Languages Association Conference, Chicago, IL, USA, December 2007.
• ‘“Location, Location, Location”: Place and Advertising in Blast, New York Dada, and Contact’, presented at the Modernist Atlantic Conference, De Montfort University, Leicester, July 2007.

Press, publicity and reviews

http://www.alphr.com/art/1005286/augmented-reality-s-future-lies-in-the-1930s-avant-garde

Further information

https://euppublishingblog.com/2020/09/14/modernism-and-lost-technology/